101/EXHIBIT is proud to present Figurative Futures, a group exhibition curated by Mark Murphy featuring 24 contemporary artists. This occasion marks Murphy’s first curated show with the gallery. The exhibition will run from July 22nd - August 26th, 2017. The opening takes place Saturday, July 22nd from 7-9pm at 668 North La Peer Drive, Los Angeles, located on the southeast corner of the Santa Monica Blvd and N La Peer Drive intersection.

Figurative Futures aims to explore the mythology and evolution of figural art realized through a wide-ranging collection of inventive painting, sculpture, installation, jewelry, fiber arts, drawing and mixed media. The participating artists have been chosen for their highly regarded imaginative output as they consistently introduce new materials revealing groundbreaking form, and possess an insatiable interest for creating fresh, redefining moments in figurativism. Mechanical pencil, graphite and charcoal, twisted wire, ceramic, carved wood, cut canvas, and belabored applications of paint reveals an eclectic community of fearless creators inducing a revised contemporary vernacular. Figurative Futures is a platform for artistic experimentation and unmistakable melding of categorical barriers.

For Show #29, Holmberg will present videos, painting, and live abstract films. In the main gallery, a multi-screen display will use computer software to tune into the radio spectrum, granting the viewer the voyeuristic, albeit abstracted, power to survey the industrial geometry of digital signals being broadcast live. Holmberg is drawn to the radio spectrum for its spatial expansiveness and its physical relationship to interconnected devices. On the one hand, these visualizations reveal the omnipresence of radio that surrounds us, but they also offer a false sense of omniscience; they're all-seeing, but they're also indecipherable, unspeakablea kind of psychic data. Complimenting this display will be a large landscape painting, the source material of which comes from the website for a military defense contractor, the Harris Corporation, which is one of the largest suppliers of police and military radios in the world. Although technological advancements have made it possible for far more amateurs to have access to the full radio spectrum, police departments' shift from analog to digital radio over the past decade has often been at the expense of transparency, with law enforcement activity being encrypted from the press and the general public. Also included in Show #29 will be a screening of Holmberg's single-channel observational videos and found footage from broadcast television, which will be played on custom hardware designed to create an infinite pomp-and-circumstance aura and to condense a playlist of videos into a singular experience. In these brief impromptu films, often shot on a handheld camera, Holmberg reduces the storytelling style of documentary filmmakers and citizen reporters by witnessing inane incidentslike an unwanted desk stickered with old CD and DVD packaging and trashed on the curbor by documenting network television's documentation of itselfas in his recording of an on-air proof-of-performance test.

Joel Holmberg (born 1982, Bethesda, MD) is an artist based in Los Angeles. He holds a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA (2005) and an MFA from Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT (2013). He has previously exhibited at the New Museum, New York, NY; American Contemporary, New York, NY; Cleopatra's, Brooklyn, NY; Outpost, Norwich, UK; The Museum of the Moving Image, New York, NY; The 9th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai, CN; The Sundance Film Festival, Park City, UT; Espace Gantner, Belfort, FR; and Kettles Yard, Cambridge, UK. From 2006 to 2012, he was a key contributor to the surf club Nasty Nets and was recently featured at Michael Benevento Gallery in Los Angeles and in the Made in L.A. 2016 biennial at the Hammer Museum.

For questions and all press inquiries, please contact Paul Slocum, Owner and Director, at info@andorgallery.com or (214) 676-5347.

Bad Reputation is pleased to present “To an Otherwise Unknown Event,” an exhibition of new sculpture and photography by RIA-B, the artist's first solo show with the gallery.

On view in the center of the exhibition is a large-scale, modular sculpture entitled “Tender Robbing Caron Covers Strapped Jocks: Cups Overfloweth with Extra Padding.” Composed of weathered wooden planks from a bleacher, the sculpture’s modules can be assembled and reassembled into a variety of configurations. Featured in the gallery is the largest of these formations. Here, the artist has constructed an armature with the original pieces in an orientation that faces inwards, turning the sculpture into itself and creating a circular focal point devoid of spectatorship or spectacle. Instead, the sculpture becomes a marker suggestive of the appropriation of another kind of present tense.

The two B/W silver gelatin prints presented alongside the sculpture are titled with digits indicating to the photographs’ respective time of exposure, including the initial exposure of the film and paper during the developing process in the darkroom.
The solarization process occurs while the print is still unfixed, and is being bathed in the photographic developer, introducing an aspect of unpredictability and allowing unknown and potentially irreversible consequences to unravel.

Baert gallery is delighted to present the first Los Angeles solo show by London based artist Ludovica Gioscia, “Infinite Present”.

The title refers to the non-linear and atemporal modus operandi that Gioscia has adopted throughout the last few years. Her artworks are in a constant flux of becoming; often composed from fragments of past and present works, as well as fragments from other dimensions.

The studio has a prominent role in Gioscia’s practice: here artworks produced by her future self appear, to be joined by works from alternative multiverses and others that the artist recreates from her dreams. Gioscia sees this process as a mirroring of the different temporal realities that have emerged in consequence of the digital revolution.

The show is comprised of numerous works, with two large installations taking centre stage, both informed by a dream that Gioscia had in September 2016. In this dream she had painted an abstract expressionistic canvas that hovered in mid air with a glowing aura. It contained everything, just like the Internet. It was at once singular and expansive.

Dream Gate is formed by 11 Portals –part of a series that Gioscia sees as surfaces of contact between different dimensions– suspended at different heights, one of which is a recreation of the painting from the dream.

The other installation is formed by three large-scale letters spelling PAN, the latin prefix to imply the union of all. The letters cast a shadow, formed from numerous other artworks, including cosmetics from multiverses.
Baert gallery is thrilled that Laurence Scott, author of The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World has contributed to the show with a poignant accompanying text, In Living Silver, which can be read below.

Ludovica Gioscia (born 1977, Rome) lives and works in London. She graduated with an MFA Fine Art Media from the Slade School of Art in 2004 and has been exhibiting internationally since. Solo shows include Shapeshifters at MaxMara in London curated by Marina Dacci and The Peacock Stage at t-space in Milan (2017), Neurotic Seduction Astral Production at John Jones Project Space in London (2014), Vermilion Glow Bleeds Rust at Riccardo Crespi in Milan (2013), Forecasting Ouroboros at MACRO in Rome (2012), Wild Boys at VITRINE in London (2010), Papered Portraits at The Warhol in Pittsburgh curated by Eric Shiner and Mikado at Siobhan Davies Studios (2009). In 2015 Gioscia presented a specially commissioned and semi-permanent site-specific installation at Maraya Art Park in Sharjah and another site-specific installation at Darb 1718 as part of OFF Biennale Cairo. Previously Gioscia has shown in group shows at the American Academy in Rome, Analix Forever in Geneva, The Miro’ Foundation in Barcelona, The Warhol in Pittsburgh, The Flag Art Foundation, Allegra LaViola and Salon 94 in NY, VITRINE, Jerwood Space and South London Gallery in London, Edinburgh College of Art, MNAC in Bucharest, Comfort Moderne in Poitiers and FuturDome in Milan.

Blum & Poe is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Jim Shaw. This marks Shaw’s second solo presentation with the gallery, and runs concurrently with the artist’s first comprehensive solo museum exhibition in Los Angeles titled The Wig Museum, on view at the Marciano Art Foundation through September 17.

For nearly forty years Shaw has been creating an expansive body of work—paintings, drawings, installations, sculpture, video, and sound—elucidating America’s social and spiritual histories. For this current exhibition the artist continues to illustrate overarching themes of belief, doubt, and politics—addressing such prescient topics as failing economies and crumbling power structures.

In a new series of paintings rendered on found theatrical backdrops, Shaw summons a mélange of superheroes, cultural figures, folkloric iconography, and apocalyptic forces of nature. A second body of work features black and white paintings in which Shaw utilizes the “cut-up method” used by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin to collage a picture of the near future. Here Shaw depicts worlds of chaos and control informed by a constant dialogue with art history and the spirit of Silver Age comics. The exhibition also features a selection of drawings—studies for the larger paintings­—offering an intimate sense of the artist’s process of generating anomalous and timeless characters and scenarios. In an adjacent room Shaw premieres his short film Tales from the Wig Museum (2017), a sequence of introductory segments to a fictional television series reminiscent of early 1960s psychological horror shows. Weaving fact and fiction, Shaw ambitiously explores history and its fringes in a search for rationality in contemporary life.

Jim Shaw (born 1952 in Midland, MI) lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his BA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Santa Clarita. His work has been shown extensively internationally and has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including major surveys at the Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA (2017); New Museum, New York, NY (2015); Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA (2015); Chalet Society, Paris, France (2013), traveled to Centre Dürrenmatt, Neuchâtel, Switzerland (2014); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2012); BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2012); Musee de’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, France (2010); MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY (2007); MAGASIN, Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble, France (2003); Musee d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland (2001); and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, UK (2000). In 2013 his work was included in The Encyclopedic Palace at the 55th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy. His work is also featured in prominent public and private collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.

We are pleased to announce the exhibition “Beyond the Blue” and accompanying panel “What’s in a Name?” as part of the Art and Restorative Justice panel series at CB1 Gallery from July 22 through September 2, 2017 with an opening reception at the gallery on Saturday, July 22, 2017 from 4:00 – 7:00 p.m. This will be the second major exhibition organized by the CSUSB Prison Arts Collective following the program’s well-received 2016 exhibition and accompanying publication, “Through the Wall: Prison Arts Collective.” Demonstrating the diversity of artistic styles and depth of creative expression among artists that are incarcerated, this exhibition will provide the unique opportunity for viewers to engage with works created by those participating in university-led arts programming while incarcerated.

This multidisciplinary exhibition will showcase dozens of paintings, drawings, and handmade objects created by participants in the California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB) Community-based Art (CBA) Prison Arts Collective project in response to five distinct, unifying themes including:

- Alternative Materiality
- Collaboration and Partnerships
- Line as Language
- Dreams, Imagination, and the Surreal
- The Experience of Incarceration

Expanding beyond the all-inclusiveness of Through the Wall, Beyond the Blue will include select works organized around specific themes determined by investigating the working practices of artists in the weekly programs. Rebutting the otherness and invisibility so frequently attributed to incarcerated artists, Beyond the Blue seeks to dismantle the stigma of outsider art through the serious consideration of work being produced by CBA participants within correctional facilities.

Reflective of the collaborative and non-hierarchal spirit of CBA programming, the exhibition will highlight artworks by those participating at all levels and working in a variety of media. This includes participants in advanced critique classes who have taught themselves formal artistic skills while incarcerated and gained art historical context for their practice as well as those only just emerging in their artistic experience.

A majority of works featured have been donated by the artists with the dual goal of sharing their work with a wider audience and raising funds to support ongoing CBA programming in prisons and in the community. Viewers are invited to participate through a written or visual reflection in a collaborative response book, an informal tour with a Teaching Artist, and/or by purchasing a work of art with all proceeds going directly to support ongoing CBA Prison Arts Collective classes.

All artworks are made by CBA participants in the Prison Arts Collective projects at six CA state prisons including the CA Institution for Men (CIM) and the CA Institution for Women (CIW) in Chino, the CA State Prison, Los Angeles County (LAC) in Lancaster, the California Rehabilitation Center (CRC) in Norco, and the Chuckawalla Valley State Prison (CVSP) and the Ironwood State Prison (ISP) in Blythe.

About CSUSB Community-based Art:
CSUSB Community-based Art is dedicated to facilitating art throughout the local community at sites that would not otherwise have access to it, including after school programs for at-risk children, shelters for youth, low-income housing for seniors, and correctional facilities including state prisons, the CSUSB Reentry Center, and County Probation. On campus, students learn about the social, cultural, and economic barriers to access to art. On site, students, alumni, and volunteers shift the paradigm by facilitating art with populations that are vulnerable and at-risk.

Artists:
Because of the large number of artists included in this exhibition and the fact that many remain anonymous due to either personal or institutional choice, the artists’ names are included with the works list as available by artist’s choice. Please note: all participating artists from the California Institution for Women are listed by first name only upon request from that institution.

Organizers:
This exhibition is co-organized by April Baca and Annie Buckley with installation design by Humberto Reynoso. Organization support was given by the graduate student research assistants: Timothy Hearans and Heather Roessler and CBA Site Leads: Jessica Agustin, Diana Hernandez, Jenny Montenegro, and Christina Quevedo. CB1 Gallery owner and Community-based Art Advisory Council member, Clyde Beswick, was instrumental in implementing this exhibition.

CB1 Gallery is pleased to present “Hot Time, Summer in the City,” a group exhibition featuring twenty-one contemporary artists, many represented by CB1 Gallery but also other artists whose work the gallery has shown or will be showing in the future. The work in the exhibition varies in medium from traditional oil and acrylic paintings to drawings that include graphite on paper, and ink and natural pigment on felt. Also included are several sculptural objects. The exhibition opens on July 22 and continues through September 2, 2017; an opening reception will be held on Saturday, July 22, from 4:00 until 7:00 p.m.

Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Wax Chromatic, our second solo exhibition with Bay Area artist Alexander Reben.

Alexander Reben‘s interactive work Wax Chromatic, will premiere in Los Angeles at Charlie James Gallery, opening Saturday, July 15. In this control-by-oration installation, viewers will be able to transform the gallery’s environment by imagining and verbalizing almost any color imaginable. Upon speaking the name of their preferred hue, the room — as will the symbiotic relationship between humanity and technology — will be illuminated with the articulated color. Color is of particular interest to Reben, given its concurrent massless nature and profound visual impact, as well as its infinitely variable gradations. The work continues the artist’s exploration into how through intelligent manipulations of our surroundings, we are becoming ever-more integrated into our environments—and they in turn, are increasingly becoming extensions of ourselves. Reben’s solo exhibition Wax Chromatic runs through August 19, 2017, alongside the group exhibition Black is a Color, curated by Essence Harden, with works by Sadie Barnette, Adee Roberson, Lauren Halsey, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Texas Isaiah, Azikiwe Mohammed, Nikki Pressley, and Patrick Martinez. An artist’s reception will be held Saturday, July 15 from 6-9pm.

Alexander Reben explores humanity through the lens of art and technology. His work deals with human-machine relationships, synthetic psychology, artificial philosophy and robot ethics among other topics. Using “art as experiment” his work allows for the viewer to experience the future within metaphorical contexts. His artwork and research has been shown and published internationally and he consults with major companies guiding innovation for the social machine future. Alexander has exhibited at venues both in the U.S. and internationally including The Vienna Biennale, MAK Contemporary Art Museum, The Vitra Design Museum, Ars Electronica, Volta, The Whitney Biennial, CERN, TFI Interactive, IDFA, ArtBots, The Tribeca Film Festival, The Camden Film Festival, Doc/Fest, and The Boston Cyberarts Gallery. His work has been covered by NPR, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Washington Post, Fast Company, Filmmaker Magazine, New Scientist, BBC, PBS, Discovery Channel, Cool Hunting and WIRED among others. He has lectured at TED, SXSW, TTI Vanguard, Google, UC Berkeley, SMFA, CCA, MIT and other universities. Reben is a graduate of the MIT Media Lab where he studied human-robot symbiosis and art. He is a 2016-2017 WIRED innovation fellow and a visiting scholar in the UC Berkeley psychology department.

Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present black is a color, a group exhibition curated by Essence Harden, with works by Sadie Barnette, Adee Roberson, Lauren Halsey, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Texas Isaiah, Azikiwe Mohammed, Nikki Pressley, and Patrick Martinez.

What would it be to see pink on the wall and name it black?

“black is a color” asks how color has been employed as a central musing on black subjectivity. The exhibition considers how color—as spectra, chroma, saturation, and vessel—is a utility of/on blackness. In thinking through the process of hyperpigments, in particular, the show centers luster and vibrancy as speculative sites on kin, cosmology, resistance, and place. Here, black optics and corporeality are equally entangled with pleasure and play as with the durability and gravity implied by black. Through each artist’s lens, color comes to (en)compass visions of black life, futures, and presence. In a gesture towards abstraction in which blackness is and is not locatable, then, “black is a color” is an epistemological exploration of black diasporic wonderings.

Sadie Barnette is from Oakland, CA. She earned her BFA from CalArts and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally at venues including The Studio Museum in Harlem (where she was Artist in Residence 2014-15), the California African American Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, The Mistake Room, and Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, South Africa. Barnette has been featured in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian UK, Artforum, Vogue, and Forbes, among other publications. Her work is in the permanent collections of museums such as The Pérez Art Museum in Miami, the California African American Museum, and The Studio Museum in Harlem. Barnette is represented by Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles and lives and works in Oakland, CA and Compton, CA

Adee Roberson was born in West Palm Beach, Florida in 1981, with strong familial ties to Jamaica. Her work weaves rich celestial landscapes with drum patterns, found photos, synthesizers and various percussion instruments. She has exhibited and performed her work in numerous galleries and independent venues including, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, SomArts Cultural Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, African American Cultural Center, and Art Gallery of Windsor, Ontario. She is based Los Angeles, and Oakland, CA where she co-founded Black Salt Collective.

Lauren Halsey was born in Los Angeles, California in 1987. She holds an MFA from Yale University (2014) and a BFA from California Institute of the Arts (2012). Lauren recently completed residencies at Recess (2016), at The Studio Museum in Harlem (2014-2015) and is the recipient of the Los Angeles Design Festival Edge Award (2017) and Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Award (2014). She builds fantasy sculptures and environments that remix ephemera she gathers with hyperreal nature, technicolors, outerspace and Funk. The works exist as spatial metaphors for liberation, self-definition and love.

Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle is an interdisciplinary visual artist, writer and performer. Her practice fluctuates between collaborations and participatory projects with alternative gallery spaces within various communities to projects that are intimate and based upon her private experiences in relationship to historical events and contexts. A term that has become a mantra for her practice is the “Historical Present,” as she examines the residue of history and how it affects our contemporary world perspective. Her artwork and experimental writing has been exhibited and performed at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Project Row Houses, The Hammer Museum, The Museum of Art at The University of New Hampshire, The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco and The Made in LA 2012 Biennial. Hinkle’s work has been reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Artforum, Hyperallergic, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post and The New York Times. She is also the recipient of several awards including: The Cultural Center for Innovation’s Investing in Artists Grant, Social Practice in Art (SPart-LA), Jacob K Javits Fellowship for Graduate Study, The Fulbright Student Fellowship, and The Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Emerging Artists Award. Her writing has appeared in Not That But This, Obsidian Journal, Among Margins: Critical & Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics, and she has a forthcoming first book called SIR, a reflection on naming as a tool for undefining the defined, that will be published with Litmus Press. Hinkle has a current solo show called The Evanesced at The California African American Museum in Los Angeles on view until June 25, 2017.

Texas Isaiah is a visual narrator from Brooklyn, NY. His work documents gender, race, and sexuality through topophilia, a strong sense of place that is connected to people’s lived poetics. By honoring the intimate relationships that individuals compose with places through experience and ancestral recognition, a space of questioning photography, both as a discipline and as a tool, is accessed. By inviting the sitter to participate in the process of creating a photograph, the attention and care becomes more operative as the light and shadow functions as a cloak for Black and POC bodies who have experienced trauma and erasure within photography.

Texas Isaiah’s work has been exhibited in various spaces such as Studio Museum in Harlem, Slought Foundation, Newspace Center for Photography, NYU Kimmel Galleries, and Dixon Place. He was named “12 African American Photographers You Should Follow Right Now” by TIME Magazine. Texas Isaiah has been featured in FADER, Spook Mag, Juxtapoz Magazine, Aperture, VSCO, Papersafe Magazine, FLATT Magazine, Original Plumbing, Elixher Magazine, The Photographic Journal, and various other publications. He is currently working on his first visual song book, Capricorn Moon, which addresses topophilia and gender through song lyrics and photographs of individuals in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco, New Orleans, and Brooklyn. Texas Isaiah currently resides in Los Angeles, but travels throughout San Francisco, Oakland, and Brooklyn.

Azikiwe Mohammed graduated from Bard College in 2005 where he studied photography and fine arts. Since then he has shown these things in galleries both nationally and internationally. In 2015 he received the Art Matters Grant, and in 2016 was the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Emmerging Artist Grant. He lives in New York and is currently in residence at Mana Fine Arts as part of their mana BSMT program

Nikki Pressley is an artist, designer and educator whose work is concerned with examining and conjuring the narratives associated with personal and collective history, language, belief and memory. She is interested in interpretations of time and space that are malleable and destabilizing in relation to humanity and self. Her work consists of various media, including graphic, ink, wood, cement and organic materials that function as contemplations on various ideas, often creating broad relationships from project to project. Nikki is inspired by how we locate physical, psychological and spiritual existences within parameters of time and place where transformations, rather than totalizing cycles, are the concern. In this line of questioning, her interests and goals lie in opening a narrative that re-captures and re-conceives individual and collective existence.

Nikki was born in Greenville, South Carolina. She received her BA from Furman University and her MFA California Institute of the Arts in Studio Art. Pressley has had solo exhibitions at Furman University, Charlies James Gallery, Darrow School and Las Cienegas Projects. Nikki was included in the emerging artist exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem entitled Fore, and was included in the 2010 California Biennial. She was also featured in the Project Series at Pomona College Museum of Art. She has participated in group exhibitions at the New Museum in New York, California African American Museum, UC Irvine, Charlie James Gallery, Torrance Art Museum, Coma Art Space in Los Angeles and others. She is also a design and educator and currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley, Patrick Martinez’s L.A. suburban upbringing and his diverse cultural background (Filipino, Mexican and Native American), provided him with a unique lens through which he interprets his surroundings. Influenced by the Hip Hop movement, Martinez cultivated his art practice through graffiti, which later led him to the Art Center College of Design, where he earned a BFA with honors in 2005. Through his facility with a wide variety of media (painting, neon, ceramic and sculpture), Martinez colorfully scrutinizes otherwise everyday realities of suburban and urban life in L.A. with humor, sensitivity and wit.

Patrick Martinez, (b. 1980 Pasadena, CA) earned his BFA with honors from Art Center College of Design in 2005. His work has been exhibited domestically and internationally in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Miami, New York and the Netherlands, and he has shown in venues including the Vincent Price Art Museum, Biola University, LA Louver, Showroom MAMA, Providence College Galleries, MACLA, SUR biennial, Chinese American Museum and Euphrat Museum of Art. He has been covered by the Los Angeles Times, KPCC, KCRW, Fusion, Art News, Opening Ceremony Art Blog and Wired. He has work in the collections of the Cornell Fine Art Museum, Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, and the Museum of Latin American Art. Martinez has his first solo museum show at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum from May 25 to September 10, 2017. Patrick lives and works in Los Angeles.

About the Curator:
Essence Harden (Oakland, CA) works at the intersections of blackness, art, and cultural history.

Essence is a Ph.D. candidate, independent curator, writer, and artist. Her visual work has appeared at Good Children Gallery, Black Portraitures III, SOMarts, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA). Her writing has appeared in Performa Magazine, SFAQ: International Arts and Culture, Everyday Feminism, Palmss Magazine, and Acres. She currently resides in Los Angeles, CA.

Essence earned her B.A in History from UC Berkeley and her M.A in African American Studies from UC Berkeley, and is a currently pursuing her Ph.D. in African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation queries post Black Power constructions of black masculinity, queerness, and fashion.

Perfectly Concocted Context by Jonathan Monk brings together three generations of artists within the frame of Jonathan Monk’s studio.

The walls of the gallery space will be wallpapered with full-scale photographs of the interior of Monk’s studio, which contains works by many artists that Monk both admires and uses in his own practice. Against the fictive backdrop of his studio, Monk will place inside the gallery space, a diverse group of artworks. Monk will present the studio – a site of reflection and production – as a finished artwork, layering the artist’s studio within the gallery.

A number of the artists included in the show have been influenced by the city of Los Angeles and its rich history of artistic production. The exhibition acts as an homage to these artists while also inviting playful parallels between the works shown in this “concocted context.”

Jonathan Monk was born in Leicester, England (b.1969) and lives and works in Berlin. Throughout his career he has used conceptual and minimal art as a form of readymade referring playfully to other artists in his work. Monk has been included in solo and group exhibitions internationally, including Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France), Kunsthaus Baselland (Basel, Switzerland), Irish Museum of Art (Dublin, Ireland), Institute of Contemporary Art (London, UK), Swiss Institute (New York, USA), The Menil Collection (Houston, USA).

Katy Cowan On Ropes and Bronze...

Jun 24 - Aug 19, 2017

Cherry and Martin is pleased to present Los Angeles-based artist Katy Cowan’s third solo exhibition at the gallery.

Commonwealth and Council presents an exhibition of recent work by Jeanine Oleson that pushes against the membrane between the expressible and the inexpressible—a layer of skin or misunderstanding that keeps one’s interiority from reaching the surface. Oleson looks for ways out: the belly button, the eye, the ear. “Can you feel it?” explores the limits of consciousness within one’s own experience.

The sculptures presented here, like all of Oleson’s work, are at once symbolic relics and conductors of phenomenology. For example, a hand-blown glass instrument illustrates the body’s negotiation with its surroundings, externalizing the functions of the breath. It was used in a recent performance at the Hammer Museum, in which three performers created sound through both breath and body temperature. In this exhibition, a transducer speaker made with a shell amplifies sound produced by the instrument’s sensors, as well as recordings from the performance. The shell here is not an object of childhood wonderment, an aural conduit of the sea, but a technical form of volume.

“Figures of Speech” (2016) reveals the normally hidden processes that allow materials to become functional. Performers transmute copper and clay into a speaker that is both object and subject—a vehicle for expression and a signifier of the precedent labor and the artist’s body of research. The performers themselves are conductors of sound and remind us of our own mechanisms to understand one another.

This material investigation is broadened to include 3D imaging technology, or the fascination with rendering in a mediated manner something that is already three-dimensional. Cyan and red are immediate denotations of enhanced dimensionality, although ultimately arbitrary choices and could be other chromatically opposite colors. This idea that we must make perceptible what is already visible, audible, or three-dimensional, becomes profound absurdity.

Kim Farkas LAMOA DS#3 presents: Le bien commun

Jul 8 - Aug 19, 2017

On the boundaries of craft, painting, design, and architecture, Kim Farkas makes biomorphic objects that build upon existing ones.

“Le bien commun” is a diorama, or a series of them. It is a rehearsal on a stage, or a maquette of one, to test and advance Kim Farkas’s construction of an autonomous and total system that slips on the roles of industry, decor, and sculpture. We’ll find here elusive images and references: a 3D model of a de-Chirico-scape, the skull of the Alien, laugh of the Medusa, Jenny’s smile.

On the boundaries of craft, painting, design, and architecture, Farkas makes biomorphic objects that build upon existing ones. Forms and references reappear, functioning not for their own sake, but the completion of this system, of a cosmology.

For the greater good, or “le bien commun”. The commonwealth.

Sonia Leimer Encounters

Jul 8 - Aug 19, 2017

For her first exhibition at Commonwealth and Council, Sonia Leimer investigates notions of territory, land, and identity.

For her first exhibition at Commonwealth and Council, Sonia Leimer investigates notions of territory, land, and identity. “Encounters” offers micro and macro views of the vehicles and effects of globalization and standardization, with both uncomfortable intimacy and extreme remoteness.

“Pink Lady” (2017) captures the annual Apple Crown ritual, a harvest tradition in which a wooden crown is decorated with apples by the people of Leimer’s hometown, Merano, Italy. Focusing on the adornment of the crown, Leimer highlights the underlying labor, tradition, and collaboration of this agrarian custom, while the subtitles delve into the strange history of the Pink Lady apple, a trademarked hybrid that is heavily regulated, especially in the European Union. The video is shown alongside aluminum devices used for measuring and standardizing apples in the EU, exponentially enlarged from their normal size. This type of tool is also used in the United States and serves to organize harvests into different quality classes.

A vintage postcard showing California orange groves completes the installation—like the apple blossoms of Merano, the image of plentiful orange groves was used as a marketing tool in the service of California boosterism. The citrus industry created the first campaign, advertising the orange as a promise of a land of sunshine, health, and wealth. In addition to the importance of their fruit industries, Merano and California are tied in their shifting identities throughout history. Merano was Austrian territory until the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, whereas California has moved from Native American to Spanish to Mexican to United States ownership; in both cases these shifts have created multi-layered, complex identities for those who live there.

The installation “Iwanowo” (2015) widens the scope of this questioning on land and territory, literally going into space to achieve a new vantage point. Leimer inserts the voice of a female cosmonaut into a found conversation between two Russian men observing Earth from the space station ISS on what they see below them. Leimer’s stand-in reveals the absurdity not only of the men’s conversation, but of our small human attempts to impose order and ownership on land and space. The accompanying I-Beam seats are upholstered using textile design produced in the former Soviet Union.

Receding further, two silkscreens on titanium foil produced by the European Space Agency show craters on Mercury resembling Mickey Mouse, one of the most recognizable forms on earth. Again, this caricature attempts to impose cognition beyond human scale.

Sonia Leimer (b. 1977, Merano, Italy; lives and works in Vienna, Austria) studied architecture at the Technical University of Vienna and the Academy of Fine Art Vienna and taught at the Academy for Art and Photography with Martin Guttmann. From 2007 to 2012, she hosted a radio show entitled “City and the Image”. Leimer has exhibited internationally at Leopold Museum, Vienna; Galerie nächst St. Stephan, Vienna; Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen; Barbara Gross Galerie, Munich; Los Angeles Museum of Art (LAMOA); 5th Moscow Biennial; artothek, Cologne; Museion, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Bozen, Italy; MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles; Kunstverein Basis, Frankfurt; BAWAG Contemporary, Vienna; Salzburger Kunstverein; and Manifesta 7, Rovereto.

David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Anthony Pearson. The show will open on July 15 and remain on view through August 26, 2017. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, July 15 from 6:00pm until 8:00pm. The exhibition will consist entirely of wall-based objects, including a new series of works the artist calls Embedments.

Anthony Pearson occupies a quietly antithetical position in a contemporary visual landscape often dominated by speed and bombast. By methodically exploring the possibilities inherent in a small group of materials, his work fosters slow, concentrated modes of perception. In recent years he has focused on hydrocal, a gypsum cement that he has poured, pigmented, and/or etched to create objects of great minimalist beauty. Characterized by subtlety of composition and color, they register otherwise imperceptible changes in the ambient conditions that surround them. Pearson’s exhibitions become total environments in which each individual work anchors the viewer’s experience of variable natural light.

The Embedments, the newest of Pearson’s typologies based in experiments with hydrocal, find him expanding the range of his palette and addressing concerns often associated with painting. He begins by stretching a length of cotton fabric in a wooden frame. He then pours in layers of liquid hydrocal, each of which has been treated with a different pigment, creating an array of hues that flow over and around one another. After the material has set, the work is turned over and the fabric removed, leaving behind the texture of its weave and tiny, embedded cotton filaments. The result is a modulated matte surface that can easily be mistaken for canvas. But these are works in which a painterly vocabulary eventually reveals itself to be sculptural in nature, as color completely saturates the slab of material in which it is suspended. A range of blues, grays, whites, pinks, and violets form interlocking shapes that recall landscape-like vistas and geological formations.

Much in the way that the image in a photograph remains invisible until it has been developed, each Embedment reveals its final form only after the cotton has been pulled away and its true surface is exposed. Photography has played a central and abiding role in Pearson’s practice since its inception (the action of a shutter capturing serial instances of light continues to be a guiding metaphor for the way he produces, edits, and installs his work) and so these new objects also provide an opportunity to reflect on the formal continuities that unite his production across different media and typologies. Unity is also achieved through the artist’s approach to framing, by which he establishes a consistent visual syntax. This in turn allows him to exert and organize a high degree of compositional freedom while maintaining an overall sense of structure.

These qualities are also evident in Pearson’s series of Etched Plaster works. Here he employs set and pigmented hydrocal as a ground for the systematic inscription of linear marks with hand tools. Featuring various iterations on a theme, specifically a circular form immersed in a dynamic field of radiating lines, their imagery evokes astronomical and meteorological phenomena like eclipses and sun flares, and their intricately textured surfaces reflect and absorb light in complex and surprising ways. Pearson tints the slabs with a range of dark gray, black, and brownish pigments, lending them a counterbalancing earthiness. Cerebral, even conceptually-oriented notions of mark-making are thereby expressed in tangibly organic materials using hands-on, analogue processes.

This contrast is a defining feature of Pearson’s project, and one that gets to the heart of its generative contradiction. While he is committed to the careful production of singular, highly tactile objects, the true subject of his practice is the total effect brought about by all of these objects as a whole, whether seen as part of a single exhibition during a specific period of time, or throughout many spaces over the course of many years. Any given work reflects not only the moment of its making, but an ongoing continuum of movement that takes place both inside and outside the framework of art. If it is often barely noticeable and therefore hard to describe, this movement is everywhere: in the gravitational force that moves the hydrocal when poured, in the light that continues to affect and alter our sense of an object’s surface, and in the passage of time that prevents us from seeing an object exactly the same way twice. As such, Pearson brings together the varied legacies of artists such as Constantin Brancusi and On Kawara, creating static forms even as he prompts heightened awareness of fluctuation and change.

Anthony Pearson (b. 1969, Los Angeles) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (2012) and Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2008). Group exhibitions include Thinking Tantra, Drawing Room, London, and Peninsula Arts, Plymouth University, Plymouth, England (2016-17); L.A. Exuberance: New Gifts by Artists, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2016-17); The Sun Placed in the Abyss, Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio (2016); Variations: Conversations in and Around Abstract Paintings, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2014); second nature: abstract photography then and now, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts (2012); and The Anxiety of Photography, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, and Arthouse at the Jones Center, Austin, Texas (2011). Pearson lives and works in Los Angeles.

David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by William E. Jones. The show will open on July 15 and remain on view through August 26, 2017. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, July 15 from 6:00pm until 8:00pm. The exhibition will feature a major new video, Fall Into Ruin, in which the artist gives a personal account of the life, home, and collection of Greek art dealer Alexander Iolas. It will also include a series of still photographs of Iolas’s villa taken by Jones on the occasion of his first trip to Greece in 1982.

For over three decades William E. Jones has been producing films, videos, photographs, and books that re-examine and repurpose existing cultural materials. While some of his sources are images and texts housed in archives, he is equally at home out in the world taking pictures and conducting interviews. He has explored the decline of America’s industrial Midwest, the representation of gay men in sources as diverse as Eastern European pornography and police surveillance footage, the psychedelic visual potential of Cold War military footage, and poetic connections between the randomized nature of the Internet and ancient philosophy.

Fall Into Ruin consists of a sequence of still images taken during visits Jones made to Greece in 1982 and 2016. These images depict the home and art collection of Alexander Iolas (1907-1987), a gay, Egyptian-born former dancer who was one of the 20th century’s most iconic art dealers, as well as scenes of present-day Athens and images of antiquities on view at the National Archaeological Museum. In an essayistic voice-over, Jones tells the story of his connection to Iolas and reflects upon the circumstances resulting in the villa’s ruin. Equal parts memoir, celebration, and lament, the video examines the value systems that made Iolas’s rarefied milieu possible and those that eventually allowed it to fall apart.

Perhaps best known as a dealer specializing in work by the Surrealists, and for his work in shaping the collection of John and Dominique de Menil, Iolas also represented major 20th century artists like Yves Klein and Paul Thek, and gave Andy Warhol his first solo exhibition. He was an international figure who spoke several languages (his galleries were located in New York, Paris, Milan, Geneva, Madrid, and Athens) and he moved with ease in a variety of social settings. “Villa Iolas,” as his Greek home was affectionately called, was a place where he could display artworks as well as host a rotating cast of eccentric characters. Jones’s pictures of the house in its heyday prompt recollections of a time when the art world privileged intimacy and personal contact. They also serve as opportunities to reflect on the committed relationships Iolas fostered with his artists, treating them as others might treat friends or even family, and his willingness to support them financially and emotionally when they fell upon hard times.

Iolas’s own collection, filled with antiquities and furniture in addition to works by the modernist masters he showed, was the product of a wide-ranging and highly personal sensibility. Objects made thousands of years apart were often installed side-by-side. Seeing this as a young man traveling abroad for the first time, Jones discovers a vital link to the ancient past and a reminder that the classical tradition is not a monolithic phenomenon but rather a messy, living, evolving force in which he too can play a part.

Jones invokes a parallel example in the figure of the poet C.P. Cavafy (1863-1933), who re-imagined scenes and characters from the past in a modern, frankly sexual idiom; like Iolas, Cavafy was a gay Greek man from Egypt who embodied an era of cosmopolitanism already on the wane. The video’s images of classical sculpture in a contemporary museum setting reinforce the fact that cultural memory is always subject to revision.

Jones further erodes any sense of easy nostalgia with images of the villa in its current dilapidated state, and of an Athens beset by problems associated with global capitalism. This juxtaposition underscores the profound changes that have taken place during the 34 years that separated his two trips to Greece. While these would seem to be cause for despair, the details of Iolas’s life offer a kind of melancholy hope, as he managed to thrive even when faced with geopolitical problems beyond his control (including fascism and financial collapse), problems that continue to reverberate today.

The still photographs on view were taken by Jones in 1982 but only printed and exhibited for the first time this year. Returning to them now becomes not only an occasion to revisit his memories of Iolas, but to revel in the lavish idiosyncrasy of the dealer’s approach to art and design. Paintings, sculptures, flowers, books, and furniture function in these works as if they were sentient beings posing for the camera. The pictures are more than documents of a time and place. They bring objects and spaces alive, reawakening a timelessness that can go dormant, but never die.

(Los Angeles) Edward Cella Art & Architecture is proud to present Lawrence Halprin: Alternative Scores - Drawing from Life, the first exhibition of a collection of rarely-seen drawings by Lawrence Halprin (1916-2009), a leading figure in American landscape architecture, urban design, and environmental planning during the second-half of the twentieth century. The exhibition reveals Halprin’s almost daily practice of drawing as a means to not only record his diverse visual experiences, but also as a tool to engage with the trials and tribulations of war, the ecstasies of life, and the rawness and beauty in nature. The exhibition includes archival video, photography, and ephemera which provide a historical context for Halprin’s life and work; and highlight the experimental Workshops and happenings that he developed in concert with his wife and influential dancer and choreographer, Anna Halprin.

Lawrence Halprin: Alternative Scores - Drawing from Life is presented concurrently with the Los Angeles A+D Museum’s The Landscape Architecture of Lawrence Halprin. The traveling exhibition, organized by The Cultural Landscape Foundation, debuted in 2016 at the National Building Museum in Washington D.C in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Halprin’s birth. Both exhibitions will be accompanied by special joint programming including tours, lectures and public events which notably highlight Halprin’s work and legacy in Southern California. See listings below.

The exhibition features the breadth of Halprin’s drawing over seven decades, and highlight his range of styles and approaches to the craft. The earliest works reflect Halprin’s Modernist sensibility that developed at the Harvard Graduate School of Design where he studied with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Walter Gropius, and Marcel Breuer, among others. Once graduated, he enlisted in WWII in 1943, and served in the South Pacific on the U.S.S. Morrison where he recorded the tropical landscapes he encountered for the first time and the immediate horrors of war though pen and ink. Lost for decades, these drawings were only found after his death in 2009.

Upon discharge in 1946, Halprin arrived in San Francisco and was joined by Anna, where they would remain throughout his life. Processing the post-traumatic stress of his service though drawing, his output began to converge with Anna’s performance-based practice; a visceral, inspirational platform which greatly informed his own work. Aside from his involvement with costume design and visual “scoring” of performative actions, the impulsivity and expressive physicality of Anna’s work becomes visually paralleled in the spontaneity and abstraction in Halprin’s drawings. The Halprins’ intimate personal and artistic partnership was the breeding ground for a lifetime of experimental performance workshops and communal living, which played a significant role in his ideas about landscape design and new graphic techniques to visually represent not only the physical landscape, but the experience of it.

The exhibition also includes drawings of Sea Ranch, a community on the Northern California coast that is one of Halprin’s most notable architectural achievements and heralds a sensitivity to protecting California’s unparalleled coastline. The dramatic rocks and crags of the coast and the relentless power and movement of nature are seemingly Halprin’s greatest sources of awe and inspiration. Lawrence Halprin: Alternative Scores - Drawing from Life offers his naturalist and botanical studies and powerful abstractions, always reflecting a deep engagement with life and an emotional inner-self.

With a resurgent interest in the work of Lawrence Halprin, ECAA is thrilled to present this extensive and singular collection of rare works on paper in the possession of the Halprin family. The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color exhibition catalogue entitled, Personal Space: The Drawing Collection of Lawrence Halprin, with essays by Eva Friedberg, independent scholar of architecture history, urban studies and landscape theory, and an introduction by Charles A. Birnbaum, President and CEO of The Cultural Landscape Foundation. Drawings from the Halprin Family Collection have been recently acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and will be featured in a forthcoming exhibition at the museum, illustrating the legacy of Sea Ranch in the context of California Design.

Featuring fifty-six newly commissioned photographs by leading landscape photographers,
the exhibition offers an overview of the life and work of landscape architect Lawrence Halprin (1916-2009). Organized during the 2016 during the centennial anniversary of Halprin’s birth by The Cultural Landscape Foundation, the exhibition includes recently rediscovered residential projects created early in his career in the 1950s to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C., capstone projects such as Stern Grove in San Francisco and the Yosemite Falls approach, and significant postmodernist projects in the Los Angeles area including a sequence of public parks in DTLA including Grand Hope Park, the Bunker Hill Steps, Maguire Gardens and Plaza Las Fuentes in Pasadena. The exhibition both honors the influential designer and calls attention to the need for informed and effective stewardship of his irreplaceable legacy.

The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color gallery guide The Landscape Architecture of Lawrence Halprin that was written by Charles A. Birnbaum FASLA, FAAR, President and CEO, and Nord Wennerstrom, Director of Communications, and published by The Cultural Landscape Foundation. There is also a complimentary online exhibition with additional photography, recollections by clients and colleagues, and segments of a video oral history with Halprin available at tclf.org/sites/default/files/microsites/halprinlegacy/index.htm